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DMPSat, 29 Oct 2016 06:52:04 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.5CtrlShift eyes expansion beyond Asiahttp://digitalmedia.vc/ctrlshift-eyes-expansion-beyond-asia/
http://digitalmedia.vc/ctrlshift-eyes-expansion-beyond-asia/#respondWed, 26 Oct 2016 06:49:37 +0000http://digitalmedia.vc/?p=801CtrlShift, a digital marketing company, is eyeing to expand beyond Asia over the next few years, with US and Europe under its radar, as its hopes to tap on the growing demand for digital advertising. The company currently has presence in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

“We are now expanding to China and thereafter US and Europe. Within Southeast Asia (SEA), we are also exploring opportunities in Vietnam – an emerging market where we see strong growth potential for its digital advertising market. By entering the market early, we will have a head start in tapping on the country’s increasingly affluent and urbanised population as the market grows,” said CrtlShift chief executive officer Deepika Nikhilender (pic above: first from right) in an email reply.

Deepika added that entering into the China market provides CrtlShift with the access to where the bulk of the demand of digital advertising is coming from. “Considering China is responsible for a huge part of digital advertising demand, expanding into China would make perfect economic sense. Currently, China is the second biggest digital advertising market worldwide with digital ad spend estimated to increase by 25.1% to hit US$22.4 billion this year,” she explained.

Plans for next 12-18 months
Prior to joining the company, Deepika lead business planning for Mindshare Asia Pacific, and was also chief executive officer of Growth and Emerging Market Solutions (GEMS). As the company’s new CEO, one of her goals over the next 1.5 years is to grow the number of clients who are keen on embarking on large projects.

“Our aim for the next level is to significantly increase the number of clients that do multi-million dollar business with us and to foster long-term partnerships with them,” she said.

To achieve the goals, she said that she will need to focus on three key areas — people, product and proposition.

]]>http://digitalmedia.vc/ctrlshift-eyes-expansion-beyond-asia/feed/02C2P: Building a powerhousehttp://digitalmedia.vc/2c2p-building-a-powerhouse/
http://digitalmedia.vc/2c2p-building-a-powerhouse/#respondTue, 25 Oct 2016 06:43:47 +0000http://digitalmedia.vc/?p=799Bangkok-based financial technology firm 2C2P Co was founded in 2007, and further proves that for all the benefits of youthful energy, a hefty dose of experience can go a long way.

“After almost a decade, we are now no longer a startup, having grown to become one of the leading financial technology (fintech) firms in Southeast Asia, reflecting the capabilities of Thai firms in this area,” said Thai-born Piyachart Ratanaprasertporn, who joined the 2C2P team in 2010 with expertise in business development.

His background, in contrast with that of 2C2P founder Aung Kyaw Moe, a Myanmar native who is an experienced IT programmer, has proved crucial to the company’s success.

That success, in turn, was borne out by the firm’s stellar efforts to attract funding.

After first planting its seed capital, the company’s developmental stages were ushered along with the help of Series A, and then B, financing. 2C2P then reached the Series C funding milestone, meaning it had laid the initial foundations necessary to potentially go public one day.

The company raised US$7 million from Series C financing, while its market valuation reached $40 million, said Mr Piyachart.

Financial transactions through its fintech application, 2C2P, totalled $3 billion baht, making it the largest e-payment service provider in Southeast Asia in terms of transaction volume.

“After years of making our presence felt in Southeast Asia, we can now say we’re a leading fintech firm in the region,” said Mr Piyachart.

“Next year we will go global by expanding our services outside of the region, including South Asia, South America and Africa. We aim to extend our operations throughout the targeted regions by 2020,” he said.

Even though its operations are primarily in Bangkok, the company was earlier based out of Singapore to gain tax privileges and incentives from the Singaporean government, which has sought to attract startups in the region.

When Aung Kyaw Moe first dreamed up 2C2P, he was the owner of an IT solution service, SinaptIQ, which he founded in 2003.

The two partners first crossed paths when SinaptIQ was hired to develop the payment gateway for Bank of Asia, which is now a part of United Overseas Bank (Thai). Mr Piyachart was a member of the electronic banking business for Bank of Asia at the time.

Aung Kyaw Moe spent almost four months developing the payment gateway, which employed the verified 3D Secure protocol used by VISA and MasterCard to guarantee security for online transactions.

After Bank of Asia’s electronic payment system was implemented, SinaptIQ dominated the online banking segment in Thailand, as almost every commercial bank relied on its system development and installation services.

In 2005, SinaptIQ stepped it up to the next level, launching its own Paysbuy service, a payment gateway for local SME online merchants.

But SinaptIQ had to sell Paysbuy to Total Access Communication Plc (DTAC) for an undisclosed sum in 2006, as it could not meet the Bank of Thailand’s regulatory requirements for e-payment licence holders, which must have a minimum of 200 million baht in registered capital.

Rather than be deterred by the setback, Aung Kyaw Moe used his expertise in payment gateway systems to set up 2C2P the following year. From there, the company would go on to develop systems for industries outside of the banking sector, including airlines.

Initially, Aung Kyaw Moe had eyed a credit card payment processor, whereby cardholders could conduct payment transactions through the platform, which would operate as a gateway between banks and airlines.

At that time, however, only 10% of cardholders made transactions via electronic platforms. As a result, he shifted the business to support offline payment systems used for online sales in order to reach those clients who did not want to use their credit cards on the internet.

Under the offline platform, those who do not use credit cards for online transactions could make payments through conventional channels like ATMs or over-the-counter services.

“It was also a key developmental stage where we could work out a processor that could be a gateway for both cash and card [payments]”, said Mr Piyachart.

“I am not tech savvy. My experience is in how to market for e-businesses, stemming from the time when I oversaw e-banking business development at Bank of Asia. I also used to work at IBM, as well as TrueMoney for True Corporation, so together we synergised our expertise,” he said.

After joining 2C2P, Mr Piyachart has helped revise the business direction from being an IT vendor to becoming an integrated service provider, allowing them to generate long-term revenue from maintenance services, rather than receiving one-time payments from systems installation.

In 2011, the company decided to take another step forward, although this expansion was going to require funding. Its first financing effort pulled in $1 million, and in 2015 two separate funding efforts brought in a total of $7 million.

The company used that money to expand its business throughout Asean, while also setting up joint ventures with local partners.

Currently 2C2P operates in Singapore, Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia, the Philippines and Hong Kong through its own local offices. In Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia its operates through partnerships and joint ventures.

But it is not only a perfect combination of two different skill sets that has made the company a success. It has also capitalised on the e-commerce boom which has hit the region over the past several years.

“The region boasts some of the highest growth in e-commerce transactions worldwide, so we can see all of the major online merchants and startups from around the globe coming here. And since we are already established, it would be easy for them to choose the services of experienced professionals,” said Mr Piyachart.

2C2P will be processing online and offline payment transactions for the companies. HBL debit and credit card holders can now transact internationally and domestically with merchants that accept Visa, MasterCard, JCB, Unionpay International and Diners Club International. Nepal Airlines and Air Astana customers can also purchase their flight tickets online with the new partnership–a move to modernise the previously manual cash-based process.

“South and Central Asia’s technology and financial landscape is fast-evolving,” said 2C2P Founder and Group CEO Aung Kyaw Moe in a press statement. “These young financial markets present huge opportunities to businesses to tap into e-commerce, opening new revenue streams among new and existing customers.”

“We’re pleased to be working with some of the leading retailers in these regions to take advantage of key economic and demographic trends around e-commerce adoption, rising urbanisation and consumer affluence, and the boom in South and Central Asia’s travel and tourism sector,” he added.

The travel and tourism sectors in South and Central Asia are growing rapidly in the past years. According to an estimate by The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), travel and tourism contributed US$57 billion (2.4 per cent of GDP) to the economy in South Asia in 2014, forecast to increase 6.7 per cent annually to US$116.5 billion (2.6 per cent of GDP) by 2025.

As for Kazakhstan, The Economist‘s Intelligence Unit estimates that e-commerce in the country crossed US$5 billion a year in 2015, which surpasses even Singapore’s own market.

“I saw similarities between Nepal versus Myanmar and other less developed SEA countries, and how this may not occur to a lot of businesses at first,” Aung wrote in an e-mail to e27.

“I was intrigued about South and Central Asia, after having the opportunity to explore Kazakhstan’s market and businesses during e27’s Echelon event last year. Now, we’re expanding!” he added.

2C2P offers omni-channel payment services tailored to the needs of financial institutions, e-commerce and m-commerce businesses, and retailers. It enables payment acceptance through credit and debit cards, as well as through bank channels such as ATMs, internet banking and mobile banking. It even facilitates cash acceptance via payment counters–a feature that remains relevant across the Southeast Asian market, with its low credit card penetration levels.

“Beside our technology and know-how, we also serve as a gateway to Southeast for businesses in Nepal and Kazakhstan. By working with us, they can look to enter and explore exciting opportunities in SEA – home to 620 million people,” Aung wrote.

Raising its Series C round in April 2015, 2C2P has been dubbed as the ‘PayPal challenger’ in Southeast Asia.

]]>http://digitalmedia.vc/2c2p-flies-beyond-southeast-asia-with-expansion-to-south-central-asia/feed/0Migme Takes on Facebook in Southeast Asiahttp://digitalmedia.vc/migme-takes-on-facebook-in-southeast-asia/
http://digitalmedia.vc/migme-takes-on-facebook-in-southeast-asia/#respondWed, 07 Sep 2016 05:56:36 +0000http://digitalmedia.vc/?p=753migme CEO Steven Goh discusses how the company is continuing its monetization model through apps and games, and how migme is working towards a cashflow positive position in 2017.

“The demand is there – people want to transact. If you are a product or service provider, you better be ready,” said Jirnexu founder Hann Liew.

According to the report – based on the Google Consumer Barometer and internal data from both companies, amongst other sources – 67% of Malaysians accessed the Internet with their mobile phones, and mobile searches for financial products grew by 68% in 2015 over the previous year.

The report also revealed that 12% of Malaysians used financial products price comparison websites in 2015: Higher than Thailand (11% of the population), Taiwan (9%), South Korea (8%) and Indonesia (1%).

Credit cards were the most searched for financial product by Malaysians online. Last year, there was a 30% increase in searches using ‘credit card’ as keywords. CIMB, Maybank, UOB and HSBC credit cards were the most popular search items among Malaysians in 2015.

There was a 30% growth in insurance-related searches from 2013, and the most-searched category was ‘auto insurance,’ followed by ‘takaful’ or Islamic insurance.

Liew said that what interested him most from the study was that more and more customers were communicating with the banks via digital channels: 14 of the 21 monthly interactions were done via digital channels.

“We also found out that digital customers interacted 12 times more with banks than non-digital customers,” he told Digital News Asia (DNA) in Kuala Lumpur recently.

This represents the company’s “series A-2” round, CEO Neil Davidson tells Tech in Asia. It brings Coda’s total funding to US$5.2 million to date (it raised US$2.3 million series A in December 2013 and US$900,000 seed in 2012).

Neil says they will use the money to bring Coda to more markets, but he refuses to disclose the details. A portion of the funds will also be spent to further develop Codashop, which distributes gift codes from popular gaming platforms such as Steam.

Coda helps digital content providers, such as Baidu, Alibaba’s UCWeb, Kunlun, Garena, and dozens other game developers, collect payments from customers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The payments can be made through bank transfers, cash payments at convenience stores, vouchers, and ewallets.

The company also works with telcos to allow users to make purchases on the web or in apps by deducting money from their prepaid mobile credit or charging it to their postpaid bill.

]]>http://digitalmedia.vc/coda-payments-scores-2m-funding-from-imj-other-investors/feed/0Southeast Asia financial comparison startup Jirnexu lands $3M to expand to digital banking serviceshttp://digitalmedia.vc/southeast-asia-financial-comparison-startup-jirnexu-lands-3m-to-expand-to-digital-banking-services/
http://digitalmedia.vc/southeast-asia-financial-comparison-startup-jirnexu-lands-3m-to-expand-to-digital-banking-services/#respondMon, 23 May 2016 05:07:26 +0000http://digitalmedia.vc/?p=741Malaysia-based financial comparison startup Saving Plus has closed a $3 million Series A round to move into new digital banking services. The company has also renamed itself Jirnexu.

The company was founded in 2012 by its CEO and former Citi banker Yuen Tuck Siew to provide better financial choices for consumers via banking comparison sites. Arriving home to Kuala Lumpur following more than decade in the UK, Siew struggled to rebuild his personal finances in the same way as he’d done when he moved to the UK, where the likes of Money Supermarket provide clarity and options for consumers.

Jirnexu operates comparison sites RinggitPlus in Malaysia and KreditGoGo in Indonesia, but now it is branching out into services for banks with XpressApply, a platform that lets financial institutions tap the internet and digital media to reach consumers. More specifically, the service, a white-label version of which will launch in the second half of this year, is used to handle credit card, loans and other banking applications online.

This new funding is led by DMP with participation from Celebes Capital, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Nullabor, Tuas Capital Partners and Anfield Equities, and has been earmarked to develop XpressApply and other digital-first products for banking.

Jirnexu is working with banks and financial organizations to offer XpressApply as an online solution that can reduce the process of applications to around 10 minutes. Beyond removing paperwork, it helps consumers get quicker and more accurate decisions and, for lenders, it allows for closer engagement with potential customers.

Siew said that, by cutting out call centers, customer conversation rates can be as much as 200 percent higher, while call center complaints are seven times higher than initial complaint volumes from XpressApply, he claimed.

“We want to change the way banks and insurance companies behave [and] make sure that the consumer can get what they want online,” he added.

]]>http://digitalmedia.vc/southeast-asia-financial-comparison-startup-jirnexu-lands-3m-to-expand-to-digital-banking-services/feed/0Thailand VC: Tough nut to crackhttp://digitalmedia.vc/thailand-vc-tough-nut-to-crack/
http://digitalmedia.vc/thailand-vc-tough-nut-to-crack/#respondThu, 05 May 2016 06:30:23 +0000http://digitalmedia.vc/?p=736Whenever a prime minister of a conservative developing country urges his people to support local tech start-ups, it is held up as evidence that populist sentiment for modernism, internationalization and riskier investment classes is finally evolving. When the leader in question also happens to be military strongman with complete control over policy implementation and local media, the message becomes all the more convincing.

This is what happened in Thailand late last month when General Prayut Chanocha officially opened the Startup Thailand 2016 fair at the National Convention Centre in Bangkok. The event served as a publicity vehicle for the government’s new THB20 billion ($574 million) venture fund, which aims to foster 10,000 start-ups in the country by 2018.

[…] These deepening regional relations indicate that though Thai business culture still requires significant modernization, the country’s economic gravity in the region holds significant potential. DMP’s Levit sees roots of an imminent growth spurt in the country’s unsung role as a major revenue driver for Asian tech companies such as Lazada, a breeding ground for success stories like Agoda and a leading player in the key internet-enabled sectors of payments and travel.

“All of these factors become visible first to entrepreneurs, then to industry insiders and slowly to the media and the global investment community,” he says. “In DMP’s opinion, there will be a surge of VC interest into Thailand this year following the waves we saw going into Malaysia last year and into Indonesia 2-3 years prior.”

“[After China] the next explosion of social media is in emerging markets” said Steven Goh, the founder and chief executive of Singapore-based migme.

Goh said migme, previously known as mig33, has the ambitious goal of becoming the Facebook of these emerging markets.
“There are just so much more people out there,” said Goh, referring to India as well as Indonesia and countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Facebook said earlier this month that it had more than 100 million monthly active users in India on Facebook Lite, a lighter version of its main smartphone app. In comparison, migme has a long way to go to get close to that number.
Migme, formerly known as mig33, has 32 million active monthly users – and one in three come from India. Photo: Company
Goh pointed out that migme has around 32 million active monthly users, a third of which come from India. Indonesia accounts for the bulk of the remainder.

To drive migme’s expansion across India, the company partnered with domestic online payment and e-commerce platform Paytm in December to facilitate the purchase of its services in the country.

]]>http://digitalmedia.vc/the-facebook-of-emerging-markets-china-backed-migme-targets-india-armed-with-lessons-learned-in-the-middle-kingdom/feed/0Mindshare veteran Deepika Nikhilender takes MD role at ad tech firm CtrlShifthttp://digitalmedia.vc/mindshare-veteran-deepika-nikhilender-takes-md-role-at-ad-tech-firm-ctrlshift/
http://digitalmedia.vc/mindshare-veteran-deepika-nikhilender-takes-md-role-at-ad-tech-firm-ctrlshift/#respondMon, 28 Mar 2016 16:55:46 +0000http://digitalmedia.vc/?p=720Singapore-based ad tech firm CtrlShift, formed at the start of last year from the merger of three companies, has named former Mindshare veteran Deepika Nikhilender as its new managing director.

Nikhilender joins the programmatic trading firm after an 18-year career at Mindshare, the last 11 as Asia Pacific business planning leader. She was also chief executive of Mindshare Growth and Emerging Market Solutions (GEMS) for the past two years.

Nikhilender will report to CtrlShift chief executive and co-founder Rene Menezes and will spearhead the firm’s Marketer Solutions and Publisher Solutions divisions.

Her arrival will signal an acceleration in growth plans, the company said.

CtrlShift was created from the merger of media trading platform AdzCentral, digital ad services firm Better Digital and ad tech distribution company Asia Digital Ventures.
Co-founder and chairman Reza Behnam, the former MD of Yahoo Southeast Asia, said that since launching it has established a “solid foundation for strong future growth”.

“While we have been relatively tight-lipped about some of the advances we have made to date, that is about to change,” he said. “Our track record of attracting top talent in the industry, as evidenced by Deepika’s decision to join us, is further proof of our strong foundation and ambitious future plans.”

Menezes described Nikhilender as an “innovative and proven leader” who can tackle both the science of building an audience and storytelling.

On its website, CtrlShift proclaims the era of advertising is over, adding we are now in the era of “delightful brand communications”.

“With her market and product expertise and leadership, we aim to accelerate our growth plans significantly,” he said. “Deepika’s addition in such a critical role will further strengthen our leadership bench as we continue to build a world-class business, with world-class talent here in Asia.”

The Mindshare stalwart, who joined the media agency as associate director of its Singapore operation in 1998 before rising to general manager and then managing director, said CtrlShift was “charting new territories in helping marketers and publishers reach and monetize audiences at scale”.

“This is evidenced by the impressive list of local, regional and multinational clients they serve,” she said. “CtrlShift has a strong battle-tested platform, a strategically designed product roadmap and an amazingly strong team.”

In further senior level changes, Behnam and joint co-founder and director Pete Yoong will take non-executive positions on the board.

Yoong said the restructure will allow Nikhilender to work closely with Menezes while freeing up all three co-founders to focus on strategy.